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About

Jan Bottiglieri

After grief had left my body to find another, or—set loose so—found no other who would harbor, no body so given to its heavy rest, that languor—something

cleaner remained: candor, maybe grace, like a shaft of dust illuminated to be at once light and shadow. How does Earth’s atmosphere, more residue than container, contain so much that is ceaseless? The surf like static that day, pulling your feet from beneath you. Bones of volcanoes, of seacoral colonies: broken, breaking in the water—

yet somehow such pleasure in it. Even you saw this: you who’d been so much grown, given to the work of goneness,

and so we let sometimes the old feeling return, mother and child, that simple kindness. Who can see? * * *

When I say you are missed, I do not expect reparation— my misanthrope, betrayer, song. The old land we’ve steered away from, those unremembered uncounted days you call childhood and I call something entirely different, happened…. though not the same.

Still: over ocean sounds it is as if I hear you saying words: remember
that was a world

stand stone still, leg bent, a snapped stick, perched like a bird on the kitchen chair, won’t even call for help down. Later I slide my jeans around

my knee’s new rosebud bump. Pink flaw, secret ache and swell:

something new for only me to know about the high shelf.

Ode: My Mother’s Mixer

The curve its neck makes:

negative space in a shape like a mouth eating the white bowl. The white bowl, ridged at the edge. The chipped enamel, the heft of the black handle.

The sound my mother’s metal measuring spoons make against the bowl edge, ticking in the cinnamon or salt:

taptap like a cracked bell rung. I cried once to hear it: stood

bent above what I’d put in the bowl, one metal spoon stopped still, still in my hand; the rest nested, hung and hanging on their fine chain.

Ode: Rind of Melon

More than skin, less than shell, taut gradient, a becoming.

If I have you it’s only as metaphor for some unseemly toughness. But melon — that sweet, different flesh, soft, seeded — requires you in your variety of forms: smooth or pebbled, green-streaked or pale cream, fragrant, crackable.

A child with a melon wedge will eat down the sugar to leave you like a little pink mouth, to smile or frown depending On how you are tilted or turned.

This morning I slice through you, I feed myself holding you, biting the fruit-color away until you are more like a curved spine. I like the fine bone you make, how taking all of you in seems possible only at first, as sweetness turns to tartness and you let me decide where you really begin.

Jan Bottiglieri lives and writes in suburban Chicago. She is a managing editor for the poetry annual RHINO and holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. Jan’s poems have appeared in december, Rattle, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs and elsewhere, and she has led poetry workshops in the Chicago area. She is the author of the chapbook Where Gravity Pools the Sugar and the full-length poetry collection Alloy (Mayapple Press, 2015.) She loves movies and baking and probably you.

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